How to Improve UX on Your Website

User experience (UX) is the dominant business philosophy today. It is based on the idea that business success and growth are directly related to the quality of your UX.

Take websites for example. If a visitor experiences confusion, frustration, or boredom while browsing your website, they will start feeling contempt towards whoever made it. And needless to say, you will have a tough time selling products to individuals who’ve had such experiences. This makes UX a top priority in web design.

Improving your website UX will help you convert more visitors into paying customers, increasing your bottom line and strengthening your brand authority online. And here is how you should do it.

Optimize Website Loading Speed

Page load speed contributes a lot to UX. If your website takes forever to load (and ‘forever’ can mean as little as 5 seconds!), your visitors will get annoyed and leave. And as more and more people start doing this, search engines will start imposing penalties on your website.

There are several things you can do to make your website load blazing fast, including:

switching from shared to dedicated server hosting

compressing images

minifying your website code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)

reducing redirects

using a content delivery network (CDN)

Find a Balance Between Form and Function

Designing a website is a careful balancing act. On one hand, you have to make your website aesthetically pleasing to stand out from competing websites. On the other hand, you also have to make your website convenient to use in order to turn visitors into customers.

Finding a balance between these two requirements is the core of UX. There is no single recipe for success here. What you have to do instead is experiment until you find a design that works.

A good place to start would be ensuring that your website has all the necessary functions such as a navigation bar, a search form, and a sitemap.

Keep Your Content Organized

Website content is as much a part of UX as is the colour of your CTA button. If your content is difficult to spot, access, or read, visitors won’t bother sticking around for long. To get the most out of your content, you first need to ensure it is written properly.

Focus on offering value to the user by providing practical advice, statistics, guides, and other kinds of useful content. In terms of organization, keep your content properly spaced so visitors can distinguish it from the rest of the page more easily.

Finally, keep related content grouped together, so visitors can easily hop from one topic to another.

Use Customer Service Chatbots

Customer service is an integral part of UX. The idea behind customer service is to reduce friction between customers and your business throughout your interactions. One common cause of friction is failing to respond to customers in time due to shortages in staff.

The way to alleviate this issue is to use customer service chatbots. A customer service chatbot can handle multiple customers at the same time, no matter where they are on the globe.

You can keep a customer service chatbot running 24/7, and they cost next to nothing to set up and maintain. They are the perfect customer service solution for businesses that want to provide a positive UX on a budget.

Don’t Use Intrusive Ads

UX is as much about implementing industry best practices, as it is about avoiding common UX pitfalls. Using intrusive ads on your website belongs firmly in the latter category.

If you make excessive use of banner ads, pop-ups, auto-playing video ads, and other kinds of in-your-face advertising, your UX will take a nosedive.

This doesn’t mean you should eschew advertising altogether. What you have to do instead is be subtle about it.

Advertise in sections that are clearly defined for this purpose, and never pester visitors about special offers or sponsored content before they get the chance to try out your website.

Make Your Users Happy, and Profit Will Follow

Keeping your website in line with current UX standards is no longer optional – it is a necessity of running a modern business website. This fact has caused a lot of grief among business owners.

Providing a positive UX costs resources, and there are a lot of ways to go about it, so there is a lot of confusion about which methods actually work and which are snake oil. If you feel the same, you can rest easy.

The methods we have described have been proven to work countless times, and they are not that difficult or costly to implement either. Try them out, and make your website grow.

By Michael Deane

Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.